Observations on development and related issues

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Relative popularity of build systems

The conventional wisdom in build systems is that GNU Autotools is the one true established standard and other ones are used only rarely.

But is this really true?

I created a script that downloads all original source packages from Ubuntu’s main pool. If there were multple versions of the same project, only the newest was chosen. Then I created a second script that goes through those packages and checks what build system they actually use. Here’s the breakdown:

Here Make(ish) means packages that don’t have any other build system, but do have a makefile. This usually indicates building via custom makefiles. Correspondingly customconf is for projects that don’t have any other build system, but have a configure file. This is usually a handwritten shell or Python file.

This data is skewed by the fact that the pool is just a jumble of packages. It would be interesting to run this analysis separately for precise, oneiric etc to see the progression over time. For truly interesting results you would run it against the whole of Debian.

The relative popularity of CMake and Autotools is roughly 20/80. This shows that Autotools is not the sole dominant player for C/C++ it once was. It’s still far and away the most popular, though.

The unknown set contains stuff such as Rake builds. I simply did not have time to add them all. It also has a lot of fonts, which makes sense, since you don’t really build those in the traditional sense.

The scripts can be downloaded here. A word of warning: to run the analysis you need to download 13 GB of source. Don’t do it just for the heck of it. The parser script does not download anything, it just produces a list of urls. Download the packages with wget -i.

Some orig packages are compressed with xz, which Python’s tarfile module can’t handle. You have to repack them yourself prior to running the analysis script.